Daily Excerpt: An Afternoon's Dictation (Greenebaum) - Dealing with Death and Dying, Chapter Six
Today's book excerpt comes from An Afternoon's Dictation by Steven Greenebaum. This book has been in the Amazon top 100 among interfaith and ecumenical books on many occasions.
PART TWO: DEALING WITH DEATH AND DYING
CHAPTER SIX
For me, while the thought of a soul being with God forever
was indeed warmly comforting, the idea of a soul dwelling in, or confined to, a
gated heaven was not. I’d grown up and indeed lived most of my life surrounded
by people who talked about heaven’s “pearly gates.” Heaven as a gated
community? The image was perfect—perfectly horrible. Only the “anointed” need
apply. And who was the guardian of the gates, checking off who would be
admitted and who would be turned away? Peter, a white male Christian saint. No,
thanks. I’ve never liked gated communities on Earth. I certainly wasn’t
interested in one for our souls.
So, what to do with, “You cannot live forever, but you can
be with Me forever.”? If religion is but a language for speaking to and about
God, then a gated community of believing souls made no sense. So, what did make
sense?
To get there, it became much clearer to me that I needed a
better understanding of God. And yes, that took time—a lot of time. It also
took a rather firm push. I got that push in a class given by a professor at the
School of Theology and Ministry at Seattle University when I was studying to be
a minister there. Our required paper was to put who and what we believed God to
be into words. What made the paper so helpful was that the professor made it
clear that he wasn’t looking for a “right answer.” What he wanted us to do was
to be clear about what we believed and then carefully explore what the
implications of that belief were. What a wonderful teacher!
By then, I’d been living with and pondering the revelations
for more than five years, without ever coming to a clear understanding of how I
saw God. Now I needed to put it into words, and as I pondered it, the thoughts
that had been swirling around in my heart and brain at last came pouring out.
Who or what had reached out to me when I was crying out for
answers? I believed then and believe now that it was God. But what do I mean by
that? I realized that had I been Muslim I would have perceived the
enlightenment as from Allah. I also realized that the Buddha had received his
enlightenment without believing that he had heard from God. Okay. If I believed
in seeking truth in the commonality of all of our spiritual traditions, how to
include not only my own Judaism, but Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and
Humanism, among so many differing ways of perceiving spirit?
The more I pondered it, the more I saw the call of the
sacred in all of our spiritual traditions as a call to morality (though the
call clearly can manifest itself quite differently): the call of justice,
compassion, love, and community. How to put that into language?
After all this time, the honest truth is that I do not know
who God is or where God dwells. What I believe is that there is a moral core to
the universe and that it has tried its best to communicate with me, as I have
done my best to understand it. I experience that moral core as God. God may not
be human, but I am. And my ability to understand the revelations shared is
limited by that.
In receiving and then pondering the revelations, it seemed
to me that I was dealing with some kind of Cosmic Conscience. Can’t I be more
exact than that? No, I can’t. Whatever had reached out to me, I wrote down what
I heard in my head, but to be able to write it down, I had to interpret it.
Because I speak English, that’s what I heard and what I wrote. But I don’t
believe that God is an English speaker any more than a speaker of Hebrew,
Latin, or any other language.
Thus, it became clear to me that I experienced God as Cosmic
Conscience, not as a “creator” of the heaven and Earth and not as a miracle
maker who can defy the laws of physics at will. I did not see God as male or
female but did see God as a timeless, compassionate call to our souls that
echoed across the universe—an abiding, loving, and cosmic call to justice and
community. This same call was to Jews in the desert, to Christians living under
the yoke of Rome, to Muhammad, and the Buddha, and so many others equally. Equally!
How we perceive that call to conscience will be different according to our
culture and era; yet, the call remains the same and has remained constant for
millennia. So, if we are not to be separated from the sacred and want to “be”
with God forever, what counts is not the specifics of our spiritual tradition
but how we answer the call to conscience, how we integrate it into our lives—or
don’t. Have we done our best, our admittedly fallible human best, to act with
justice, to love compassion, and to embrace our human community as we walk
humbly with however we define and view the sacred?
Perhaps, then, God didn’t create us in God’s image. Perhaps
we arrogant humans created God in our image. Some have used this possibility to
argue that there is no God. I don’t. My belief, as it has evolved, as I have
learned and listened, is not that humanity invented God but rather that we have
anthropomorphized God because we humans are far more comfortable making the
sacred look like us than we are dealing with the unknown and perhaps
unknowable.
It occurred to me, and still echoes in my heart and mind,
that perhaps what Abraham heard was the sacred call of Cosmic Conscience, a
call that included justice for Sodom and Gomorrah. Perhaps it was the call of
Cosmic Conscience to lead his people from slavery that Moses heard. Perhaps
what Jesus heard was the clarion call of abiding love and justice. And so on,
including the Buddha, Muhammad, Bahaullah, Black Elk, and so many others—both the
famous and so many not known to us. Contemplating this, the life and words of
the Buddha in particular called to me.
As I explored Buddhism, we seemed to have a lot in common
(to be clear, I’m no expert and cannot speak for Buddhism). While there are indeed
differences, these differences seem to be cultural—a different way of
expressing the same vision of the call to each of us made by Cosmic Conscience.
As I read about Nirvana and that some souls are reborn, almost always several
times before reaching Nirvana, I wondered if perhaps Nirvana is the Buddhist
interpretation of becoming one with Cosmic Conscience.
Might then having our souls reborn be another opportunity to
find our way to be one with the eternal call to justice, compassion, and
community? If we answer the call of Cosmic Conscience, the call of God, then
perhaps this is what it means for our souls to walk with God. If we will become
part of that Cosmic Conscience, then perhaps that is what is meant that our
souls can be with God forever. No heaven needed. No gated community required.
Rather, when our minds and bodies die and our soul leaves the Earth, we can
become one with the cosmic call to love, justice, and community that is God.
But, I now ponder, perhaps there was a time when heaven was
needed, when a gated community was required. Both early Jews and Christians
lived in a hugely different era. There were no telescopes. There was nothing to
tell our brothers and sisters of that era that those twinkling lights in the
sky were in fact stars, and that there were galaxies out there. They lived at a
time when it was believed that just above our earthly horizon God or the gods
dwelt. The Earth didn’t orbit the Sun. The Sun orbited the Earth. The ancient
Greeks thought that Apollo stashed the Sun in his chariot and rode it across
the sky. The ancient Hebrews didn’t think of the Sun being moved by a chariot
but that God both moved the Sun around the Earth and could stop it at will (and
did stop it at least once, at Joshua’s bidding; Joshua 10:13). So, the ancients
thought the idea of heaven was real, and perhaps early Christians, suffering
under the severe lash of Rome, needed to believe in a gated community in
heaven, a refuge from the violence on Earth.
When I understood this, another revelation was made clear.
You have
misconstrued hell and heaven. Those who separate themselves from Me in life
will be separated from Me in death. No more. No less.
If, then, we would not be separated from God, we need to
attend to the nurturing of our souls and an embrace of the sacred truths that
dwell at the top of our sacred mountain: love, compassion, justice, community.
It is, then, humanity who has created the hell of fire and
brimstone, as we’ve created hell on Earth with witch-burnings and crusades,
over and over again with our arrogance and violent self-righteousness. God
makes clear: there is no hell other than separation from God’s call to embrace
conscience, which, as far as I can see, is nothing like the hell humanity has
created out of our greed, arrogance, and a consuming quest for power.
I believe that the person who would condemn us to hell—rabbi,
imam, minister, priest, or other—is condemning him/herself and no one else. We
do, however, condemn ourselves when we follow such people. As Jesus told us,
“Let the one who is without sin cast the first stone.” And as none of us is
perfect, we really do need to stop our stone-throwing.
We are cautioned,
I have
imbued every religion with truth. You have imbued every religion with magic[1].
The truth of it is, we like miracles. Throughout human
history, it has been so much easier to deal with miracles than to eat our
veggies and answer the call of Cosmic Conscience. But we can do it. It’s up to
us.
I’d close this chapter with this rather stark but at the
same time beautiful statement.
Ye who seek
to live forever shall die. Ye who seek to live well shall crumble. Ye who seek
to live in harmony with all shall know what it is to be blessed.
For me, to be blessed is for our souls to be with God, for
our souls to dwell with and indeed be a part of Cosmic Conscience forever. A
blessing indeed. Though I’m sure it will come as no surprise that to gain such
a blessing involves work—a lot of it. Indeed, it requires a lifetime’s worth.
We’ll explore broad categories of the work we are called to in the chapters
that follow. But first, let us examine a bit more closely some revelations
about how we might prepare ourselves to be one with Cosmic Conscience.
[1] This is the one and only
revelation that I’ve “edited”. When I first wrote it down, I wrote “mysticism”.
I explain why I changed “mysticism” to magic” in “One Family: Indivisible,” page 163. In short, I believe that at the
time I made no difference in my mind between magic and mysticism. When I later
realized that my understanding of mysticism was inaccurate, I changed the word
in the revelation to what it reads now: “magic.”
Book Description:
Indies Today runner-up
Firebird Book Awards honorable mention
Pacific Book Award finalist (runner-up)
American Legacy Book Awards finalist
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